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Civil Society
Also Known As burgerliche Gesellschaft
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Civil society (burgerliche Gesellschaft) is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's term, given its lasting philosophical structure in Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), for the intermediate sphere of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) that stands between the family and the state. Where the family binds individuals together through sentiment and love, dissolving their separate particularity into a single unit, civil society treats its members as singular, self-identical individuals who enter freely into relationships external to their own particular ends, above all through the system of needs, the network of market exchange and legally regulated labor by which people depend on one another to satisfy wants they cannot meet alone. Hegel treats family and civil society as opposite but interlocking principles whose tension the state's own institutions are built to resolve, rather than as a sphere the state merely regulates from outside.
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Hegel gave civil society its modern philosophical structure in Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820).
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